


the light of our armistice day

by dirtybinary



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Art Student Steve, BuckyCap - Freeform, Clones, Crack, M/M, Past Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-03-17 02:31:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3511901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Bucky isn’t all that suave nowadays, which explains why the first thing he says to his new—and incredibly hot and lethal-looking—teammate is, “Oh.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Followed by, “Um."</i>
</p><p>
  <i>And then, “I didn’t realise we were going to a masquerade. I would’ve brought my domino mask.”</i>
</p><p>Bucky isn't quite sure who the Winter Soldier is, or how they wound up working a mission together, or how to get him to <i>talk</i>, but he has to admit the guy is ridiculously attractive.</p><p>This fic features clones of uncertain provenance, a slightly ditzy BuckyCap, ill-advised flirtation attempts, and an infestation of Jameses. Tongue very much in cheek.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [airafleeza](https://archiveofourown.org/users/airafleeza/gifts).



> I guess this can be considered a continuation of the [Your Kind of Idiot](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1744628) universe, in which Bucky doesn't fall off the train, but goes down with Steve on the Valkyrie and wakes up with him in the twenty-first century. Hijinx ensue.
> 
> So... this is pretty much an AU of an AU. You don't have to read that fic to understand this one, though.

i.

The thing is, Bucky’s supposed to be the charming one.

As far as everyone is concerned, he’s the guy who always looks put together and has his hair artfully slicked into place and can charm his way into the pants of anybody in any given room with a success rate of about 97.5%. Fighting a war and then crashing a plane with his idiot best friend/sometime boyfriend and then spending the next seventy years fossilised in ice hasn’t changed that much, or at least, that’s what he likes to pretend. And he’s good at pretending. 

But what people don’t realise is that, (a), it _is_ an act, and (b), if they’re going to compare him to Steve (which they always do because apparently their status as _SteveandBucky_ —a human portmanteau—is the one thing that hasn’t changed in this century), they’ll need to account for contrast effects. Namely, that Steve at his best makes _everyone_ look suave.

And Bucky isn’t all that suave nowadays, which explains why the first thing he says to his new—and incredibly hot and lethal-looking—teammate is, “Oh.”

Followed by, “Um.”

And then, “I didn’t realise we were going to a masquerade. I would’ve brought my domino mask.”

 

 

ii.

His teammates exchange pained looks. They’re all there already, waiting for him in the briefing room: Hill, their commander, who gives them their mission parameters; Romanoff, Bucky’s wingman, sass buddy, and tech expert; and Rumlow, who doesn’t do anything specific that he can name, but who is pretty dastardly in a close fight.

And then there’s the newcomer. A shadow lurking (seriously, Bucky’s not being melodramatic; there is literally _no other word for it_ ) at the end of the conference table, which incidentally—or not—happens to be in the darkest corner of the room. He’s dressed entirely in black leather, guns and knives hanging from his person like tinsel on a Christmas tree. To complete the look, the guy is wearing a mask that covers his face from the eyes down, and everything from the eyes up is half obscured by long tousled hair.

He looks like he’s just fallen out of a weapons catalogue. It’s ridiculous. It’s also—and yes, Bucky is well-informed that he has the most bizarre taste in men, and has been for the last eighty years or so—kind of attractive, in a terrifying way.

Romanoff says, with her accustomed snark, “Charming, Barnes.” 

Bucky pulls up a chair and sits down, clutching the shield (which he still thinks of as Steve's, even now, and probably always will) to his chest. He’s pretty sure his heart is actually palpitating. “Could I have the pleasure of, ah, an introduction?”

His charm is battered and, he’s aware, slightly sepia-toned, but it still works for him more often than not. Apparently, today is not his lucky day. The man doesn’t respond, doesn’t even _move_ , but his eyes do, flicking over to size him up from behind the fall of brown hair. They’re a pale flinty blue, sort of like Bucky’s own, alert and intelligent and startlingly bright above the mask. One of the sleeves of his jacket is a different colour than the other, and gleams a little in the fluorescent light as if it’s made of metal and—holy shit, it’s not his sleeve, it’s his _arm_ , and it is, in fact, made of metal, with a big red star shining on the bicep. Which is sinuously curved like real muscle, except with plates and grooves where skin would be, and Bucky immediately thinks of Steve. Of how he would love to pose this man in his fancy-shmancy new studio, and analyse the play of light along the contour of his arm, and make endless studies of his profile.

Hill clears her throat, which is a sure sign that he’s been staring. He thinks he’s damned well entitled to a good look, though, considering the other guy is making eye contact like he’s trying to rearrange the air molecules between them by sheer willpower alone. “Barnes,” Hill says, “this is the Winter Soldier. This mission’s a big one, so we thought you could use a bit of extra muscle on your team. Especially now that Steve’s quit.”

She seems slightly flustered, which—coming from Hill—is a sure sign that the apocalypse is beginning. “Right,” says Bucky, somewhat belatedly. “Damn Steve and his art degree. Um. Where were we?”

 

 

iii.

It _is_ a pretty big mission, even by their standards—an idiot scientist went and built an army of killer drones, which would have been messy enough if some local megalomaniac type hadn’t stolen them and sent them rampaging up and down NYC—so Bucky, despite some misgivings about whether he will remember how to walk and talk at the same time in the presence of his new teammate, let alone _fight_ , is glad to have the Winter Soldier with them. Hill leaves them alone in the briefing room while they wait for the quinjet to arrive, and Bucky takes the opportunity to try and chat up the stranger again.

“So,” he says, approaching with caution and sliding into the seat nearest the Soldier. “You got a first name?”

The man fixes him with that cool, measuring gaze. There is a subtle arrogance written into all the long lines of his posture, the way he sits with his flesh arm—sleeved in waxy Kevlar and gloved in leather, like the rest of him—thrust out on the table in front of him, while the metal elbow rests lightly on the arm of his swivel chair as if it were a throne. Steve has the same gravity, but in this man it is less benign. After a long moment, he says, “Yes.” 

His voice is smoky and rough, as if seldom used. God, how melodramatic. The man would fit right in with Steve’s new starving-artist crowd. They could all take turns sketching him and attempting to draw him into their conversations about the ills of capitalism or whatever it is they talk about after class. “Well,” says Bucky, “you’re really gregarious, aren’t you? Can I call you by your name, then? Whatever it is?”

Romanoff is gone, ostensibly to get a pre-mission snack from the vending machine, probably to corner Hill and interrogate her about the latest addition to their team. So, when the Soldier’s eyes slide to Bucky’s right, he knows the man must be glancing towards Rumlow. At length, the gravelly voice says, “It’s James.”

“Oh, God,” says Bucky before he can stop himself. “Another one? It’s a fucking infestation.”

The Soldier, amazingly, looks shifty and sort of apologetic. He flips some of the long hair out of his eyes, and peers at Bucky with his now unobscured vision. “I didn’t pick it.”

He can hear Rumlow cackling behind him, the dickhead. “Whatever, neither did I,” says Bucky. “Well, James the Eleventh—or was it the Twelfth in this building alone, I’ve lost count—meet James the First, the self-proclaimed original, because I was born before any of you and I could probably make all you lot change your names if I wanted. I go by Bucky, though.” 

“Bucky,” the Soldier—James—repeats, slowly and carefully, as if adding a new foreign word to his vocabulary. He makes no further addition to the conversation.

“Yeah,” says Bucky. He sort of wants to ask the guy to take off his mask, just so he can see if his face is as appealing as the rest of him, but he’s worked with enough people to know that everyone has their weird quirks and hang-ups, which he tries his hardest to accommodate. Maybe James is horribly disfigured or something. “Anyway… the arm’s pretty cool. What does it do?” 

“A lot,” says James, helpfully.

Rumlow is laughing again. The blue eyes flicker over to look at him, then at Bucky, then at the door, then at Bucky once more. Bucky does a sort of ungraceful mental flail, looking for something else to say that might elicit an actual response or, failing that, an escape route from the conversation. Hot strangers will be the death of him someday. Hot strangers who speak entirely in monosyllables, and who carry enough weaponry to outfit half a STRIKE team—“Oh!” Bucky says, his gaze alighting on the gun hanging from the leather straps criss-crossing the back of James’s jacket. “That’s a gorgeous Skorpion. I use one too.”

To his absolute delight, James looks pleased. His eyes stop skittering, and his shoulders relax a little. “It’s a Vz. 61,” he tells Bucky, and his metal fingers rise to touch the grip of the gun with something close to reverence. “I’ve used it a long time.”

“Huh,” says Bucky. His eyes have glazed over. The plates on the arm actually _move._ “Me, too.”

 

 

iv.

This is how the mission begins: Romanoff infiltrates the evil guy’s base and analyses the pattern of the drones’ patrols, and then orchestrates their discreet entrance via a back door. They make it all the way to the super-secret basement where the evil dude is hiding, and then some alarm goes off, and within seconds they’re being shot at by a dozen killer robots.

This is how Bucky falls in love: suddenly, and irrevocably, and under threat of imminent death.

He’s doing a pretty good job defending himself and his team from the creatures, shooting with one hand and deflecting bullets with Steve’s shield hanging on the other arm, until three of the drones seem to decide that he’s the leader and take it upon themselves to fly at him all at once. A laser beam knocks him off his feet and flat on his face in a decidedly unsuperheroic sprawl. He hurls the shield at one of them, slicing it out of the air, and then of course—of _course_ , because he isn’t Steve, and because he used up all his quota of luck back in 1945 when he fell thirty thousand feet into the Arctic and didn’t die—the fucking shield lodges in a wall and doesn’t come back to him. It just sits there like a useless Frisbee some blasted dog forgot to catch, taunting him from its vantage point twelve feet above his head and out of reach. Swearing eloquently, he pulls himself into a crouch and fires wildly at the two remaining drones, intending to drag them both down to hell with him, and then— 

—then there’s a weird squeaky electronic noise, and something hard makes impact with his ribs and knocks him to the floor. He rolls over onto his side and peeks up to see James standing over him. The metal arm shoots out, catches one of the drones with its shining fingers, and shatters it against the wall like so much crumpled paper. The other hand is already firing that splendid Skorpion, taking out the remaining drone. The whole thing lasts maybe half a second.

Christ, Bucky thinks. He is screwed. He is _so screwed_ , because if there is one thing he and Steve have in common, it’s the penchant for falling completely and utterly in love with hot people who save their lives by shooting guns at dangerous things. 

He hears the sharp mechanical whine again, and looks up to see James plucking the shield out of the wall and handing it down to him. Bucky reaches for it, and he’s pretty sure his face looks like Cinderella’s when the glass slipper fits. “Fucking particoloured Frisbee,” he says, staggering to his feet. “Thanks, I gue—“ 

Another drone swoops towards them, and they duck beneath the shield together. Bucky angles it just right, so that the drone’s laser beam goes splintering off to hit another flying robot out of the air; and James fires once under the shield without even having to look, knocking the first drone out of commission. They don’t have to exchange words. It’s almost like fighting at Steve’s side, the effortless interplay of limbs and gunfire and vibranium, James’s body a natural extension of his own. He knows James feels it too, because his eyes are shining when he glances sideways at Bucky, and—well, it’s hard to tell, but he might actually be smiling under the mask.

“Thanks,” Bucky says again. And then, because he never did know when to quit while he was ahead—“You wanna get coffee or something after this?”

Impossibly, James’s eyes crinkle at the edges. He doesn’t answer, but he holds Bucky’s gaze for a moment longer than strictly necessary, and then vanishes back into the fray. 

(“I heard that,” says Romanoff over their private comms channel. Bucky can hear her laughing over a steady staccato of gunshots, wild and gleeful and exuberant. “Pretty nice try, Barnes. I think he likes you.”)

 

 

v. 

Back on the quinjet, once they finish patching up their wounds (nothing major, which they are all well aware that they owe to the Winter Soldier’s quick reflexes), Bucky makes a beeline for the empty seat next to James and plops himself down uninvited. “You know,” he says, “the mission’s done. You could probably stand to lose some of that gear.”

He’s stripped down to a shirt over his ridiculous blue trousers and dark red boots. Romanoff has changed into a Hawkeye hoodie and sweatpants, looking like a somewhat tousled but immensely satisfied cat, and Rumlow is literally just walking around in a wife-beater and boxers like the douche that he is. James is the only one still in full gear. He looks a little perplexed at Bucky’s suggestion. “Why?”

“ _Why_? Why not? Because—okay, you know what, never mind.” It’s obvious that James is pretty weird even for a SHIELD agent—if that’s even what he is, and Bucky can’t believe he just worked a mission with this dude and doesn’t know which division he normally belongs to, or his clearance level, or even his fucking last name—but he likes the guy, and doesn’t want to make him uncomfortable. He might actually be Bucky’s favourite James now; after Rhodey, of course, because Rhodey belongs to a class all of his own. “I think we worked well together,” Bucky says, after an awkward silence has been allowed to develop and stretch itself thin between them. “I wouldn’t mind doing that again.”

James seems to take it as a compliment. He looks reassured, and then shyly pleased. Fuck, Bucky _really_ wants to see him without the mask on. This man is fast becoming an obsession, a recurring dream in the making. Pushing his luck, Bucky adds, “So, about that coffee?”

No response. He hadn’t been expecting one, anyway. “There’s a nice diner a couple streets away from the Triskelion,” he says. Mostly because, for Bucky, flirting is a ballistic movement that cannot be adjusted once it’s begun. “Cheap and quiet, with really off-the-wall décor. My friend Steve loves it. You free this weekend?"

Above the mask, James’s eyes look fretful again. They flicker to Bucky’s right. Bucky turns, and sees Rumlow hovering close at hand, pretending to be fascinated by his smartphone. Asshole. James clears his throat, and says, “I don’t think I will be.” As Bucky glances back at him, he lowers his gaze, looking a little bit like a sad puppy. “Sorry.”

It’s the most words he’s strung together all day, which Bucky feels is sort of a minor win in itself. He shrugs. He might no longer be Mr. Suave, but he does know how to take a rejection with grace. “No problem. Some other time, yeah?” And because James is glancing towards Rumlow again, and because Bucky is starting to become aware of a growing knot of unease in his stomach, he pulls out a pad of Post-Its and scribbles his number on it. He doesn’t know how James is with having things handed to him, so he sticks it on the wall between them and proffers a smile. “Call me if you change your mind.”

He already knows, without having to ask, that it’s not going to happen. But James stares at the Post-It like he’s trying to etch the number into his brain forever, and Bucky decides to season his bafflement with a dash of hope. Maybe he won’t call. But he’s pretty sure James isn’t going to forget him anytime soon, and that's as good a start as any.

He goes back to his own seat and starts composing a text. _STEVIE I met this gorgeous guy on a mission. He’s fucking weird, like you. Think I might be a little bit in love._

And then, because Steve is the other half of his soul and there’s no point keeping anything from him: _Also think he might be trouble. Not heartbreak sort of trouble (at least, not yet????) but like, rescue-mission sort of trouble? Need to do some digging._  

And then: _Your shield is a fucking traitor and I hate your dumb red gloves._

He smiles, as his phone starts lighting up with Steve’s replies.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes hi it only took me _four months_ to finish the sequel.
> 
> Still lots of crack and fluff, but warnings apply for some heavier content in this chapter: non-graphic violence, physical injuries, drug use, and allusions to past trauma/brainwashing.

i.

At 0330 hours, the quinjet touches down on the Triskelion airstrip.

At 0345 hours, the STRIKE team bundles the Winter Soldier into the back of an armoured truck. James vanishes with a last forlorn look at his new friends, the Post-It note with Bucky’s number winking beneath the star on his metal arm.

At 0416 hours, Bucky concludes his blow-by-blow account of the mission for a bleary-eyed, messy-haired, charcoal-fingered* Steve, subsides into a mess of fatigued limbs on their bed, and moans, “I’ll probably never see him again.”

(* Steve has a still life assignment due at 0900 hours. Steve is Not Amused.)

At 0417 hours, Steve says, very sternly, “If you don’t look for him, I will.”

  
  


At 1215 hours, Natasha Romanoff is accosted in an empty briefing room by the new and entirely unimproved Captain America, who brandishes a Subway sandwich, a scalding espresso, and twenty-one different types of dark chocolate.

“Bribery, Barnes?” she asks, quirking a sardonic red brow. (Bucky practices the Romanoff Eyebrow Raise in front of his bathroom mirror for fifteen minutes daily. He still hasn’t come close to approximating its sheer lackadaisical arrogance.) “You know you turn into a kitten with a ball of yarn whenever you get an idea in your head? You tangle yourself up in it, and someone has to come and free you, and then you just dive back in—” 

“Come on,” says Bucky. “You know something about everything. I bet you know all about the Winter Soldier.” 

He pops one of the chocolates into his mouth, licks his fingers as obscenely as possible, and manufactures his cutest boytoy pout. Natasha’s lack of response is as withering as it is deliberate. “He doesn’t exist,” she says. “Or he’s more than one person. At least, those are the prevailing theories.” 

Once in a very long while, people manage to come away from conversations with Agent Romanoff without a blinding headache. Bucky has never been so fortunate. “How can he not exist? We _met_ him.” 

Natasha unfolds the Subway wrapper, scrutinises the contents for any sign of bell peppers, satisfies herself that the spawn of the devil does not inhabit her sandwich, and makes Bucky wait till she is halfway through her first bite before she answers. “I mean,” she says, “he’s got a prolific list of kills going back sixty years or more. No single person could do that, not even if he started as young as I did. More likely than not, he’s several agents working under the same codename, but no one knows anything for sure.”

“But you do,” Bucky persists. “You could help me find him.”

She shrugs. “I could run a search in our Persons of Interest database, but don’t hold your breath. There’s probably about five hundred Jameses in it, and none of them are what I would call boyfriend material.” One corner of her mouth twitches upwards. “If you and Steve are bored, I may know a friend of a friend who’s interested in that sort of thing.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “That’s all right.” His phone is lighting up with a call, and he knows she’s noticed Steve’s smiling face on the screen. “We’ll just have to make do with each other.”

“What a hardship,” says Natasha mournfully.

  
  


At 1546 hours, Brock Rumlow takes a break from filing mission reports and heads to the pantry in search of a snack. He re-emerges at 1555 hours, looking suspiciously like a bird that has flown straight into a window.

He spends the interim sidling round and round the microwave counter, trying to sidestep the large and somewhat alarming figure of his commander. Bucky can be imposing when he puts his mind to it. He is in full uniform, with the shield on his back and several guns holstered conspicuously on his hips. He does not plan to use them, but for some reason Rumlow never seems to take him seriously unless it’s a matter of life and death. “You’ve worked with him before. I know it. Where is he now?”

“Wow, Cap, chill out.” Rumlow completes another circuit of the counter. He has a can of Sprite in one hand and a grilled cheese sandwich in the other, and is almost certainly trying to figure out how to incapacitate Bucky with them. “Look, you’re the one who got all chummy with him. I’m sorry he didn’t call you back, but—”

“This isn’t about that,” says Bucky. “I need to know where to find him. That’s all.” 

Rumlow’s customary wolfish grin is a little fractured. “He doesn’t really strike me as the type to have a Facebook profile. I’m sure Romanoff would Google him for you if you asked.”

“I know how to use Google, Agent,” Bucky says. As a rule, razor-barbed repartee is only fun with Natasha and Steve. “How long have you known him? Who brings him in? For which missions?” 

Deep grooves furrow Rumlow’s forehead. “That’s classified as fuck, man. I want to help you, but I’d be in all sorts of deep shit if I told you that. You got clearance?” 

Clearance, a.k.a. ‘the number on your badge determines which set of lies we feed you’. SHIELD’s favourite buzzword, and half the reason Steve quit. Bucky has been outmanoeuvred with a trump card and he knows it. Drawing out the consonant with childish petulance, he says, “Nope.”

Rumlow produces an elaborate, commiserative shrug, and waits for Bucky to get out of the way. Relief sluices from him like dirty bathwater. “Sorry I can’t be more help, Cap. I guess you could ask Fury.”

  
  


At 1716 hours, Bucky decides to take the hint.

By 1605 hours, it is already too late.

  
  


At 1843 hours, Bucky turns his bike into a quiet side alley to take a call.

He is famished and irritable. Even with the help of his informal espionage network ( _n_ = 8; demographic make-up: 37.5% security guards, 50% janitors, 12.5% cute interns), he had no luck unearthing Nick, who left the building at four P.M. after one of his insalubrious meetings with the World Security Council. Half the roads are closed because of yet another street shooting. He tried to call Steve before heading home, just to make sure he was all right, but the little shit wasn’t answering his phone. Now, to top it all off, Maria Hill’s voice is crackling over his headset. “Cap, we need you now. Where are you?”

In his exhaustion, Bucky has the primitive ear of an infant, taking in the prosody of the words before he absorbs their semantics. They are sharpened with a frantic urgency he seldom hears from Hill, and it alarms him. “On the way home. Did something happen? I’ve been trying to get hold of you and Nick all day, but—”

“He’s at your apartment now,” says Hill crisply. “There’s an assassin after him. He needs backup. I’m trying to contact Steve and Agent 13. You’re on perimeter.”

Anger renders him mute for a split second. In his own apartment, where Steve, sweet, precious Steve with paint and soot on his fingers, will be in danger. The next moment his battle instincts kick in, and he revs his bike. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Her voice arrests him, strange and taut, before he hangs up. “Cap?”

“Yeah?”

“I know what you wanted to ask Nick,” says Hill. “We have CCTV footage of the assassin. It’s James. It’s the Winter Soldier.”

  
  


ii.

Denial, applied liberally to a limited area, is the best of all palliatives. 

It gets Bucky as far as the rooftop of the office next to his apartment building. He sights down the barrel of his semiautomatic at his target, his fingers sweating on the trigger. “James,” he says. The air is viscous and miserly in his nasal passages, reluctant to be inhaled. “James, step back from the rifle _._ ” 

Across the roof, the Winter Soldier looks up from his scope. He’s armoured like a medieval knight, and all Bucky can see of him consists of mask and arm and blank eyes ringed with black paint. The camouflage seems to blunt his features with a sort of baleful sadness. A light comes on in the upper window of the apartment building; they both turn long enough to see Steve’s bright head moving across the room before the light flicks out again. “James, don’t do this,” says Bucky. “Whatever they’re paying you, SHIELD can offer you more.”

“Keep him talking,” says Hill’s voice in his headset. “Agent 13 is moving into position. Keep the Soldier distracted.”

“ _James._ ”

That sliver of living face under the leather and armour is about as informative as a Rorschach test: Bucky thinks James looks puzzled and peeved, like a child being pestered by a younger sibling, but he could be projecting. The gravelly voice says, “Payment?”

Hill is operating on the hypothesis that the Soldier is an independent contractor, a killer for hire. James looks so baffled, though, that Bucky rules this out and fumbles towards another possibility: that somehow, someone is controlling him. They’ve all heard about Deathlok and Akela Amador. He tries another tack. “Look, James, we’re friends, right? If you’re in trouble, we can protect you. But I swear to God, if you fire that rifle I’ll have to hurt you.”

James looks nonplussed. “How the hell do you know my name?” 

“Because—” Bucky’s stomach plummets. Words elude him. “Because you told me yesterday? Remember the infestation of Jameses?” 

The confusion on the Soldier’s face is now laced with hostility. Static chatters in Bucky’s ear, and Hill says, “Take him down.” 

Bucky ignores her. His pulse is rabbiting away in his throat, just above the collar of his tac suit. Maybe Natasha was right. Maybe the Winter Soldier really is a bunch of different guys, and this is James’s evil twin. “Jesus, it was barely a day ago. It’s Barnes, Bucky Barnes. We fought off a bunch of drones together and you saved my life. Ring any bells?”

“Cap, _take him down._ ”

Somewhere in his cortex, action potentials fire. His finger tightens on the trigger. SHIELD likes him a lot more than Steve, because he actually prefers to comply with direct orders. But then— 

But then James squints at him. His eyes focus with suspicious, unwilling recognition. “Bucky?” 

“Yeah,” says Bucky. Perspiration pours down his face. “Yeah, the dumbass who tried to ask you out for coffee. Look, I’m not gonna hurt—”

Something moves in the window, now darkened. In the same moment, James glances sharply behind Bucky, as if someone is coming up behind him.

Trusting to the reflexes that have kept him alive through a war and an alien invasion, Bucky whirls around to look, his gun turning with him. No one is there. It takes him only a heartbeat to detect the ruse. He whips back at once, drawing breath to yell; but it’s too late. Three shots ring out, splintering the quiet night. Three holes appear in the plaster of his apartment wall. There’s a crash. He screams, “Steve!”

Coherent thought abandons him in a bloody rout. He squeezes the trigger: three times for James’s three slugs. Hill is shouting into his ear. He can’t hear her. The metal arm comes up with a whir and a malevolent flash, deflecting the shots into the ground. James isn’t even looking at him. He’s staring into the window; and Bucky follows his gaze, unable to move, unable to breathe, every cell in his body hanging suspended over an abyss of worst-case scenarios.

Then movement flickers again. Two blond heads come into view: Steve and Agent 13, bent over something on the floor. No sign of Nick. Bucky is still swamped under a wave of selfish, shameful relief when James swings the rifle over his shoulder, and takes off running.

Bucky’s body responds before his conscious mind does. He gasps, “Pursuing,” and sprints across the rooftop after the receding black silhouette. The shield leaves his hands. Without so much as glancing back, James dodges, and the damnable thing breaks a window and pisses off somewhere. Bucky fires his pistol again. James hurls himself sideways with a speed both acrobatic and bullish, and then they’re both at a dead end, on the edge of the office building facing the street.

There’s a stupendous crash behind them. _Christ_ , Bucky thinks. _Enter golden retriever, stage left._ Steve calls, “Mind your head, Buck.” 

Bucky flattens himself to the ground. The shield flies over his head. _Exit rottweiler, stage right,_ he thinks—but on the very edge of the building, James turns, and his metal arm shrieks again. It catches the shield like it weighs nothing at all, and slings it back.

Steve isn’t expecting it. It takes him in the stomach, and he yells and vanishes over the edge of the roof. Bucky rolls to his feet, swearing. He hasn’t fallen—Bucky can hear him cursing and scrabbling around on a window-ledge just out of sight. As he runs to help, he glimpses several STRIKE trucks pulling up outside their block with agents spilling out of them, machine guns raised. “Late as always, Rumlow,” says Bucky into his comms, hand already extended to Steve. 

A crushing grip catches his arm. There is a crunch, and blinding pain. “No,” says James, breath hot against his ear. “Come with me.”

Several feet away, Steve’s ruffled head clears the edge of the roof, and a pair of angry blue eyes comes into view. Bucky struggles to throw James off. It’s like bench-pressing a building. “Let go.”

He has one last bullet in his pistol. He angles the barrel just so, and fires, and is rewarded by James’s muffled expulsion of breath behind the mask. Then the pain reaches a crescendo, and Bucky has just enough time to think, _Exeunt, pursued by bear_ and laugh, inane and hysterical, before the world disappears and takes Steve’s face with it.

  
  


iii.

The funny thing is, this isn’t even the worst time Bucky has woken up and found himself shackled to a wall.

It might crack the top ten, though. Without opening his eyes, he takes stock. Pounding headache, check. Broken arm and dislocated shoulder, check. Cold manacles around wrists, check. His prison is cool and dim—probably underground. Tiny voices are emanating from a singular point somewhere ahead and to his left. One of them is familiar: Hill’s, on a playback loop. _Cap, where are you? Are you hurt? Come in, Barnes, do you need EMTs? Cap, where are you? Are you hurt?—_  

“You’re awake,” says James, though Bucky hasn’t moved an inch. 

With antipathy and rancour that he hopes are evident to his captor, Bucky opens his eyes. He’s sitting on grimy concrete, with chains around his wrists that fasten to the wall somewhere above his throbbing head. His left arm is a morass of screaming nerves. James is on a stool in front of him, still masked, though he’s washed off the paint and stripped down to a grubby undershirt. The splotch of dried blood over his abdomen and the medical equipment on the table beside him—needle, thread, roll of bandages—are the only evidence that Bucky has shot him. Otherwise, he looks perfectly fine. 

Bucky makes a quick mental inventory of the potential weapons laid out on the table. The components of the sniper rifle, dismantled for cleaning. The Skorpion, and an enviable array of knives. Two headsets. One is Bucky’s, out of which Hill’s voice is still looping. The other must be James’s own. The second voice belongs to a man, speaking in rapid Russian. Bucky doesn’t know enough of the language to follow the gist of the orders, but it’s plain that the handler is angry, and possibly also terrified. 

James follows his line of sight to the table. A brief hint of what looks like distaste enters and leaves his eyes. His metal hand picks up both headsets, and the fingers close. The voices stop. 

A restless disquiet settles over the room like a wet blanket.

“Man,” says Bucky, for no reason other than to break the unwholesome silence. His eyes track across the room. No windows. An air vent, barred. A steel door, probably locked. The shield is gone. So are his guns. Good news: his sole captor is injured. Bad news: he could probably still kill Bucky with his pinky finger. “You could’ve just taken me up on that coffee.” 

Under his tangled hair, James frowns. “Coffee?”

In their chains, Bucky’s hands close into fists. He can still see Steve toppling off the roof in slow motion. “God, you really are a dick, aren’t you? Do you really not remember, or are you just screwing with me?” 

“I don’t remember,” says James. “They do things to my head, so I forget.” He hesitates. His soft voice is without inflection. “Do they do things to your head, too?”

An operating table somewhere in Italy. A dark, stifling room, racked now and then by half-human screams, and a smiling doctor, bending over him with a syringe—

“No,” says Bucky, so loudly that the walls of the—warehouse basement? cellar? secret underground lair?—steal his voice and throw it back in a susurration of echoes. “No one has done anything to my head in seventy years, aside from you possibly punching me in the hindbrain.”

These days he is only sarcastic when angry. James stands up, his movements a trifle stiffer than usual. Bucky braces himself for the blow, but it doesn’t come. Instead James rummages in one of the little black pouches on his belt, and steps closer with something in the palm of his flesh hand: a single white pill. Bucky eyes it with distrust. Phantom fire blazes in his veins.

“It’s an analgesic,” says James. “If it works on me, it’ll work on you.” 

His forehead glistens with a sheen of sweat. Even standing over Bucky, he doesn’t look threatening. He looks… nervous, if such a thing can even be imagined of such a person. Bucky doesn’t think this is a trick. In fact, just going by the wide gazelle eyes, the Winter Soldier might even belong to that sorry subset of human beings who are incapable of telling a lie ( _n_ currently = 0 because, contrary to popular opinion, Steve is not a member).

Slowly, Bucky reaches for the pill and puts it in his mouth. James offers him some stale-tasting water from a flask to wash it down. It takes effect almost at once: his headache relents, and even his arm stops burning. Blinking hard at the sudden lightness in his head, Bucky asks, “Why did you bring me here?”

“You know me,” says James.

Bucky produces a mirthless laugh. “I gotta say, that’s a bit of an overstatement.” 

He doesn’t know what he expects. It certainly isn’t for James’s face—what he can see of it, anyway—to fall with a disappointment so heart-wrenching Bucky doesn’t think he’s felt anything like that since he turned eight and couldn’t spend his birthday with Steve, because the asshole was in the hospital again. “But you said you did." 

“We met _yesterday_ ,” says Bucky, beset by inordinate guilt. “You told me your name was James. That’s literally all I know about you. And today—today I came home to find you lurking outside my house, pointing a sniper rifle at my boss and my best friend—”

James says, “They told me to do it.”

This is the second manifestation so far of the nameless, faceless, multi-purpose _they_ , so often used by disgruntled infantrymen, bureaucrats, and scared children. “Who’s _they_?”

“HYDRA,” says James.

It’s like a stab of déjà vu. Bucky has heard that name exactly twice this century: once, when Nick debriefed him and Steve in that strange faux-vintage hospital room, after they’d all had a good laugh about the anachronism of the baseball game; and once, when he and Steve and Natasha had gone to the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian for shits and giggles.”Look,” he says. “This is gonna come as a shock to you—it came as a shock to me, too—but it’s 2014. That ship went down decades ago. I’d know, okay? I was there when it sank.” 

“Sank?” James repeats. For the first time, his eyes look angry above the mask. “It can’t do that. Cut off one head—”

“—two more will take its place,” Bucky murmurs, before he realises what he’s saying.

Fever threatens to burn his brains out through his eyes. His wrists and ankles are chafed from straining against his bonds. Sweat drips down his jaw to pool on the operating table—or maybe it’s tears; courage lost its meaning long ago when the black tanks mowed down his troop at Azzano. People in coats are standing over him with clipboards, talking in a mixture of German and English. _This one is sturdy_ , says the doctor, beaming. His eyes are benevolent, his singsong accent rhythmic, like a gentle lullaby. It would be so easy to go to sleep now. _Draw another sample. From him we will make a hundred supersoldiers, each one deadlier than Erskine’s little brat—_  

No, no, no. Steve needs him. Him: _Barnes, J. B., Sergeant, serial number three-two-five-five-seven—oh my god, how does it go—three-two-five—_

“—five-seven-zero-three-eight.” The voice is not his own. James is kneeling beside him, his ungentle hands on Bucky’s shoulders, one cold, one burning hot. “Why do you know my number? Why do you have my face?”

Bucky wrenches his head away, retching. “What are you talking about? How do _you_ know the number?” His voice is shrill, like a toddler’s. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

The answer is already on James’s lips when the door flies open. 

A whirl of red and blue and white explodes across the room. They both duck. The shield embeds in the wall above them, shearing Bucky’s chains in half with a clangour that makes his head start pounding all over again. Bucky wrenches it out of the concrete and slams its rim into James’s chest, sending him sprawling. The Soldier recovers like a cat. He’s already reaching for the Skorpion when Steve, newly precipitated in the doorway, hurls one of Natasha’s Widow’s Bites onto the barrel of the gun. Electricity snaps. James withdraws his metal fingers just in time. Instead he goes for his belt, and something round and metallic jounces across the floor.

Bucky raises the shield. “Steve, get over here!”

Steve kicks the grenade aside and launches himself across the room, under the shelter of Bucky’s arm. Then the explosion comes.

It’s a small, controlled one. The table goes flying, and all manner of minor missiles—the debris of James’s rifle, and his knives—rattle against the shield in a cloud of smoke. Apart from that, nothing happens. By the time they come up for air, they are the only ones in the room.

Steve bends over Bucky’s broken arm, lines etched deep around his eyes and his frowning mouth. “Damnit,” he says, with a viciousness that would astonish most people. “Damn it all to hell.”

He pulls the manacles away from Bucky’s wrists. Then he gets up and surveys the wreckage of the room. Booted feet—a great many of them, by the sounds of it—are clumping towards the door at a run. James can’t have gotten out that way. But the grille over the air vent has been removed, lying on its side against the filthy wall. Steve stares at it for a second or two, his expression inscrutable. Then he hefts it in one hand and puts it back in place.

Bucky opens his mouth, and shuts it as Rumlow skids through the open door and into the room. The STRIKE team jogs in behind him, coughing in the clearing smoke. They stare around them, wild-eyed through their helmet visors; then Rumlow picks up James’s jacket from where it’s been tossed against the far wall, and without preamble asks, “Which way did he go?”

In this, as in everything else, Bucky takes his cues from Steve. “He got to the hallway just before you did,” says Steve, who is by now easing Bucky to his feet with all the exaggerated care of a museum curator handling the Mona Lisa, and therefore nowhere near the air vent. “Must have gotten out that way.”

Rumlow and his team clatter off again without another word. Steve scowls at his back. “He always this intense?”

“Yes,” says Natasha, before Bucky can answer. She has materialised at the door in the wake of the STRIKE troopers, looking puffy-eyed and exhausted and altogether very much like an injured hedgehog. Her eyes sweep the room, and linger on the air vent. “Coffee date didn’t go so well?”

Bucky grimaces. “Aww, c’mon, not now.” 

Steve is suspiciously quiet, holding aloof from the banter. And the timbre of Natasha’s voice is different, brittle, like a stiletto about to snap. Unsmiling, she says, “You should have let me introduce you to that friend of a friend.”

“Tasha,” says Bucky, holding on to Steve’s bicep for support. “Is Nick—did he—”

Natasha levels him with a stare. She says, “He didn’t make it,” and walks straight out again.

The pain is clawing its way back, gaining ground by inches. Bucky is shaking. Hill told him to take James down. He could have done it. He should have. That was his job. Against any other adversary, he would never have stayed his hand. But James— 

Steve is saying something, his head close to Bucky’s. Bucky wrenches away from him with far more force than is advisable, jarring his hurt arm in its socket. He looks away so he won’t have to see Steve’s kicked-puppy expression. “Not my fault,” he says. “I get it. Except that it was.” 

His gaze lands on the air vent, and his mind is inundated by vivid images of James oozing between the walls of the building like a horde of spiders. His skin crawls. “Fucking hell. What’s wrong with you? He killed Nick, and you let him go?”

Steve is silent. It’s a guilty silence, the same sort that—back in the day—usually preceded an explanation for the new bruise blossoming at his temple, or his bloodied knees; or the enlistment form clutched in his grubby fist, half the fields filled in with neat falsehoods. “You know who he is?” Bucky demanded. “You found out?”

“I didn’t find out anything,” says Steve. He may be two inches taller than Bucky now and built like a house, but he still sounds like the same grumpy pissbaby when he gets defensive. “I used my eyes, unlike you. You really don’t know?”

Bucky is about two seconds away from throwing something at him. “Well, I’m asking.”

“I worked out the trajectory of those slugs through the wall. It was an impossible shot, you know, like the one you made in ‘44, dangling out of that helicopter in the rain.” Steve’s voice has descended to a whisper, as if he’s praying. His cheeks are very white. “You don’t see it? You haven’t realised? Buck, he moves like you. He fights like you. He has your hair, your eyes. He’s you.” 

Bucky’s knees won’t hold him up. He puts his weight against the wall. At the back of his head, a voice is reciting a number. _32557038._ James’s voice. His voice. “Ha ha,” he says, the syllables reedy on his tongue. Denial, the best of all palliatives. “And he has a metal arm, while I’ve got a broken one. Very funny, Steve.” 

“I’m not joking.” Steve’s voice has risen. Bucky wonders if he knows what his jaw looks like when he’s angry. It’s only a little ridiculous. “Have you ever seen him without the mask on?” 

He hasn’t, though he _has_ devoted quite a fair bit of the last twenty-four hours to imagining what’s beneath the mask. The usual mental picture comes out looking more or less like Steve, if a bit more rugged, with a stubbled chin shaped like Rumlow’s; but he sure as hell isn’t going to admit that to anyone. “He knew my serial number. He asked me why I had his face.” 

He gazes up at Steve, goosebumped. “It’s not possible. I’d know if I’d been cloned or something.” 

“Would you?” asks Steve gently. “In Azzano?”

Bucky can’t answer. Steve’s arms come around his waist, steadying him, holding him close. “I’ll splint your arm,” says Steve. No doctors. Bucky hasn’t seen a doctor since ‘43. “Then we’re going to find out what happened to you in that lab. And _then_ we’ll find your James.”

He lifts his hand to touch Bucky’s cheek. His fingertips are turquoise and cerulean today. For some reason, that makes Bucky want to cry.

  
  


iv.

There is a funeral with a closed coffin. Secretary Pierce, looking worried and distracted, delivers a eulogy filled with half-hearted witticisms. Rumlow fidgets. Hill avoids being drawn into conversation. Natasha wipes her eyes and blows her nose, and everyone else looks away in superstitious terror. 

Bucky’s arm is in a sling with tiny guns and grenades doodled on it, courtesy of Steve. They loiter near the back of the graveyard. Steve has bags under his eyes from staying up late to papier-mâché a towering sculpture of old pistols (hands: grey), but his pupils are alert and watchful. “Look at all these people,” he says, as the service draws to an end and the mourners begin to leave. “I feel like I’m on Wall Street after a stock market crash.” 

Half the people in attendance are texting furiously. As Bucky watches, Hill detaches herself from the milling crowd and disappears into a waiting cab without so much as a glance their way. He wonders if she’s mad at him for fucking the mission up. They probably all are. 

“Seriously,” says Steve. His hand is a gentle, steadying presence in the small of Bucky’s back. “Look at Rumlow’s STRIKE team. They look like they’re waiting to be deployed on a big mission, all huddled together like penguins.” 

Pierce is coming towards them, arm already outstretched for a handshake. Steve plasters on his patented Boy Scout smile, all 7 A.M. sunshine and apple pies, and steps forward to meet him. “Morning, sir. Yes. Yes, so sad—”

Bucky hovers around long enough to exchange platitudes and field the obligatory questions about his arm, and then wanders off by himself. A hint of auburn catches his eye, moving purposefully through the crowd: Natasha, headed to her car. He starts jogging after her, ignoring the splinters of pain that jolt through his shoulder at the movement. “Tasha!”

She looks at him across the roof of her car. Her face, as always, is unrevelatory. “If you’re here to be patted on the back and told it wasn’t your fault, call me back in a couple of days,” she says. “If you have something important to tell me, get in the car.”

He gets in the car.

After a few seconds of silence he chances a sideways look at her, and realises that she hasn’t been glowering at him like he’s assumed, but studying the dissipating throng of mourners through the windshield. He asks, “You swept for bugs?” 

“Twice.” 

“Okay.” He scrubs his good hand across his eyes. There are some things that have to be said flat out, that no amount of prevarication will ameliorate (e.g. “it’s 2011”, “she’s alive, but she’s, like, ninety-two now”, “my evil twin just killed our boss”). He takes a deep breath and says, “Steve thinks Zola took my DNA back in ‘43, and the Winter Soldier is my clone.” 

She bites her lip, fingernail tracing patterns across the top of the steering wheel. This is her Thinking in Progress face. “That’s the punchline,” says Bucky. “This is where you’re supposed to laugh.”

She doesn’t. A tidal wave of suspicion looms over Bucky for a moment, and then crashes down over his head. “Did you guess?”

“I did some digging,” says Natasha. “I looked for old photographs, CCTV footage, eyewitness reports, things like that. No, there aren’t pictures of him without the mask,” she adds, as Bucky draws a hopeful breath. “There are barely any pictures of him, period. But I’ve never seen anyone shoot like him, except you.”

“That’s what Steve said,” says Bucky, feeling deflated.

“Aside from the fact that he fights like a rhinoceros, and you fight like a cat dropped in a bucket of water—”

“Hey!”

“—I’d say Occam’s razor points to cloning as the most plausible explanation. What I’m curious about is how many clones there are, and how HYDRA—if that’s who’s in charge—is controlling them all.” Her smile is small and sad and remote. “By the way, remind me to introduce you to OkCupid. I’d say at least eighty percent of the users aren’t legendary amnesiac assassins.”

He laughs, if only out of relief. If they’re joking with each other again, she’s all right. They’re all right. “Oh, God,” he says. “I asked my clone out on a date. I’m a narcissist. I’m as bad as Stark.”

“Worse,” says Natasha, peering out the window. “I mean, if Stark met himself on the street, he’d probably just punch him in the face or something. Barnes, are you seeing this? This is the sixth phone call Rumlow has made since the service ended, but nobody’s answered him so far.” 

“How do you know?”

“His lips don’t move.” 

Bucky frowns. He thinks back to the night on the quinjet, and the hunch he’d developed there, when James— _his_ James, the shy stranger who’d saved his life, not the blank-eyed sniper on the roof—had been sitting just across the aisle from him with a Post-It stuck to his arm. He says, “I think I know where to start looking.”

Natasha nods. “Yeah,” she says, though he hasn’t elaborated. Her penchant for reading minds remains alarming. “Yeah, start there.”

“And you?” asks Bucky, his hand already on the door handle. “What will you do?”

She shrugs, distant mirth gathering in the crinkles around her eyes. “Sharon wants me to drive to New Jersey with her. I haven’t the faintest clue why, but it sounds like fun.”

He wrinkles up his nose, and gets out of the car. 

Steve is waiting for him by his bike. Bucky makes a beeline for him, already working out a schedule of undercover agents to put on Rumlow’s tail. Steve isn’t allowed to miss class for anything short of a full-scale invasion, and they don’t know which of the others are HYDRA moles, but there’s always Bucky’s network of janitors and interns, and some of the Howlies’ grandkids—he could totally see Jeanine Morita as a spy— 

His phone vibrates just as he reaches Steve. It’s an unfamiliar number. On an ordinary day he would ignore the call, but nothing has been ordinary since the night Nick died and HYDRA came back to life. The space-time fabric has bunched up around him, jarring cause and effect out of order, and premonition pools in each of its folds. He finds himself hitting the Answer button, pulse already speeding up. “Hello?”

At first there is silence. Then a voice— _the_ voice— _his_ voice—says, “Bucky.”

Bucky says, “James.”

One of the senators is coming his way for a word. The SHIELD personnel around them—the people to whom he’s trusted his life for the last three years—seem like walking, talking cardboard cutouts, flimsy lids on the jars of arcane poisons. All but Steve: Boy Scout Steve, who at once shifts up a gear into Media Darling Steve, moving to intercept the senator with a solemn smile and a firm handshake. Bucky turns the key in the bike’s ignition, and under the noise of the purring engine says again, “James?”

Hesitantly, James asks, “Was your friend hurt?”

It takes a moment to make sense of this non-sequitur. Steve. He means Steve, when the grenade went off. “No.”

Light breathing. Then—“I broke your arm.”

It sounds like the rough anatomy of an apology, sketched by someone who has never seen one in his life. “Yeah, bud,” says Bucky. “You also murdered my favourite boss. I’m at his funeral now. Wanna come?” 

He thinks the silence now sounds vaguely guilty. James says, “Don’t hang up.”

“I’m right here.”

Having successfully fended off the senator, Steve returns to his side, standing so close his enhanced hearing can probably make out every word James is saying. Or not saying. After a few more beats of dead air, James says, “I’m outside your apartment now. Will you come home?”

“ _You’re in_ —James, man, that’s creepy.”

They’ve been holed up with this cute ex-pararescue Steve met while showing off on his morning run not long ago, since their own apartment—now sporting three bullet-holes in the wall and a major bloodstain on the carpet—is the very definition of _compromised_. “I’m on the balcony,” says James. There is no hesitation this time, just a hasty torrent of words. “I’ll wait here. I won’t go in.” 

“No, it’s fine.” Bucky glances up at Steve, giving him an eloquent look. Forget tailing Rumlow; this is more important. “Go inside. Get in and close the curtains and just—just sit down somewhere out of sight. We’re on our way.”

He thinks he hears the click of a lock, and the squeak of their sliding glass door. “I’m in,” says James, sounding uncertain. “Where should I sit?”

“On a chair,” says Bucky firmly. Steve is already on the bike. Bucky climbs on behind him, the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. “Pick one and sit down. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  
  


v. 

Here is a fact about Steve Rogers: he either drives like he’s got a little old lady perched on the back of his bike, or like a robber fleeing a bank heist. There is no in between.

Here is a mistake Bucky Barnes makes: he says, “Drive slowly.” 

Here is the natural outcome: they run four red lights, shave two streets from their route by cutting headlong across an empty field, and reach the apartment in 9 minutes 48 seconds. 

They find it in pitch darkness. James has indeed closed all the curtains, but neglected to turn on any lights. All they can see is a man-shaped shadow sitting at the kitchen counter with a gun-like thing laid out before him, pointedly out of arm’s reach. He stands up when they come in. Steve hits the light switches, and the orange kitchen lamps come on, casting an incongruously warm glow over their visitor.

He’s dressed in civvies this time—it’s a pretty coordinated outfit, jeans and denim jacket and black t-shirt beneath—but he still has the mask on, and a pair of goggles hangs from the V-neck of his shirt. He stares expectantly at Bucky. So does Steve.

“Okay,” says Bucky. “Right.” He takes a deep breath, and tries to keep the shiver out of his voice. “Before we do anything, do you mind taking the mask off?”

James hesitates. As before, the look in his eyes straddles the fine line between terror and hostility. Steve says, softly, “He needs to see.”

No iteration of Bucky could ever refuse Steve anything. James says nothing, but the strained line of his back relaxes fractionally. Keeping his movements steady, Bucky steps around the counter—slow, slow, slow—and reaches one-handed around James’s shaggy head to unfasten the clasp holding the mask in place.

Once, a lifetime ago, he’d stood on a bridge above a chasm of fire and watched a man peel off his own face. He hadn’t thought anything could be worse than that. James’s eyes are quick and bright, his hair tangled but clean under Bucky’s working fingers. Then the mask comes away, and it’s like looking into a funhouse mirror.

Nobody would ever mistake one of them for the other. Bucky is ninety-six and, at present, feels every one of those years; but if possible, James looks even older. There are reddish-grey saucers under his eyes and deep ditches scored in his forehead and around his mouth. In ‘43, after Azzano, Bucky had looked at his reflection in a muddy pool and seen something like this. He’d sloughed off this skin under Steve’s watchful care, slowly learned to live and laugh and take care of himself again. But no one ever gave James the chance. 

Bucky sits down, hard, on one of the kitchen stools. 

“You know, when I was a kid,” he says, half to himself, “I asked my mom what happened to my dream selves when I woke up from a nightmare. If they would simply disappear, like dew, or stay trapped in the dream forever without me.” 

He gazes up at James, expecting to find stone-cold incomprehension, but to his surprise the sharp eyes are watching him with keen attention. Of course. In the days since the drone mission, he’s forgotten that James actually behaves like a human being now and then. That he _is_ a human being. Bucky’s eyes sting, and a diaphanous haze settles over his vision, so that everything sparkles under a fragile liquid gauze. 

James stares at Bucky in alarm, and then at the mask in his hand. “Should I put it back on?”

“No,” says Steve. 

“No,” says Bucky. Then he adds, “It’s a perfectly good face.”

Steve gives him a Look. He is at the fridge, pulling out items at random—lettuce, tomatoes, frozen ham—and arranging them on the table around James’s gun. Steve is always hungry. If James is anything like him, he’s probably ravenous too. “Are there any more of you?” Bucky asks, a little afraid to hear the answer. “Of—us?”

“I’m not sure,” says James. “I haven’t met any more. I think maybe they all died.”

Steve looks like he’s been kicked in the gut. Bucky, on the other hand, feels an odd sense of relief. _Good._ “Sit down,” he says. “Where have you been these few days?” 

James sits down beside him. Like this, it’s easy to forget the battle lines between them, and remember that only a few days ago they were shooting at death robots together. “In hiding,” he says. “I wasn’t supposed to… abduct you. If I’d gone back to base, they would have punished me. Wiped me.”

“Wiped you?” asks Steve, looking up from the triple-decker sandwich he’s assembling. A deep frown downturns his lips. 

“His memories,” Bucky ventures, sotto voce. He hopes he’s wrong.

James nods. “Then I would forget you again. I didn’t want that. So I lay low in a safehouse for a while—it belongs to one of my handlers, but he didn’t know I was there till yesterday. He’s already in trouble for misplacing me, and both sides would kill him if they caught him hiding me, so I told him he could call in the STRIKE team to take me in. Then I gave him the slip and escaped.”

“This handler,” says Bucky slowly. “His name wouldn’t by any chance be Brock Rumlow?”

Steve’s eyebrows go up, then down again as his eyes narrow. James shuffles his feet, his hands clasped between his knees. “Yes.”

“That _bastard_.” 

“I don’t know if he is,” says James, almost apologetically. “I don’t remember him sometimes. But he’s been on my team for years. He doesn’t treat me badly. I didn’t want to get him killed.”

“Well,” says Bucky, “let’s hope he manages it all by himself.”

For a moment he could swear that James scowls at him. It’s the same look Bucky would have given anybody who’d insulted one of his buddies in the 107th back in the war, or—God forbid—one of the Howlies. They really are the same, he realises. They watch out for their team. 

“I can tell you what they’re planning,” says James now, as Steve lays a platter of skyscraper-like sandwiches on the counter between them and pours three glasses of OJ. “I can give you some of their names, or at least, the ones I remember.” 

“In return for what?” asks Bucky warily.

“No more wipes,” James says.

“Of course.”

“No doctors.”

“Hell, yeah,” Bucky agrees.

James fidgets. He’ll probably ask for immunity. Bucky isn’t sure he can guarantee that, if it’s even right for him to try, after what happened to Nick. But maybe if he had a fair trial—can a clone be put on trial? does James even have any sort of constitutional rights?—a jury might be moved to be lenient. 

But James just examines the sandwich closest to him with a look of profound concentration, and says, “Can I eat this?”

“Yeah,” says Steve. There’s something broken and ragged and somehow still tender in his voice. “Eat all of them if you like.”

James nods. Then he rubs his eyes. His lids are beginning to droop. “Also a nap?”

“Sure,” says Steve quietly.

“Okay,” says James. He looks relieved, and thoroughly accomplished. “I accept your terms.”

  
  


vi. 

The upshot: Bucky now knows where Nick used to go when he disappeared into the bowels of the Triskelion; they have graduated from death robots to death helicarriers; and Steve might have to miss three deadlines and a whole week’s worth of lectures.

James polishes off the sandwiches, though he politely leaves one each for Steve and Bucky. Then he asks for pen and paper, and writes out a list of names in large, grade-schooler print, stopping every so often to knead his temples and think. The list starts with _Alexander Pierce_ , to Bucky’s faint astonishment, and ends—somewhat reluctantly—with _James B._

Afterwards James takes a shower under Steve’s supervision, puts on some of Bucky’s clothes, and lies down on the makeshift bed they’ve made up for him on the couch. He looks edgy, his eyes roving from window to door and back again. Steve is on the balcony, trying to get in touch with Hill, so Bucky sits down on the floor beside James to keep him calm. His arm is unwieldy in its sling. “What are those pictures?” James asks. 

He’s looking at the artwork mounted on the walls. “Oh, those,” says Bucky, not even trying to suppress the pride in his voice. “Most of them are Steve’s work. He’s an art student.” 

Digital paintings of dogs and bikes and Peggy Carter’s wrinkled, capable hands. A watercolour of Bucky, perched shirtless on the windowsill with a half-eaten apple and a lopsided smile. A crumpled, sketchy self-portrait done in faded pencil and touched up again in pen, so old that the paper is yellowing beneath the odd brown stains on it; Steve keeps trying to take it down and Bucky keeps putting it back. “I like that one,” says James.

Bucky doesn’t even need to ask which one he means. “Yeah. Me too.” 

Steve comes inside a few minutes later. In the harsh light his edges are diamond-sharp, the contours of his cheeks and the angles of his jaw chiseled like one of his sculptures; but he stops just inside the balcony door to survey James’s sleeping form and Bucky next to him, and something soft steals over his face. “We’re not bringing him in,” he whispers. “If only because there’s nowhere to bring him to. I asked Maria if I could take him to Sam’s and she said okay.”

“Right,” says Bucky. He pads across the living room and insinuates himself against Steve’s side, where his cheek fits perfectly against the curve of Steve’s neck. He could use a nap himself, or, failing that, a good cuddle.

Steve’s arms close around him, bracketing out the rest of the world for a while. “You’ll look after him until HYDRA goes down.” As Bucky starts to protest, he adds, “You’re not going to be much use on the helicarriers with that broken arm, you jerk.”

It’s a valid point, if a sore one. “But what about you? Who’ll go with you?” 

“Sam,” says Steve. “Maria. Sharon and Nat. It’ll be over in a day tops. You don’t have to worry.”

Bucky wonders, with a sudden surge of nausea, what colour Steve’s hands will be when he’s done with Project Insight. He says, “I don’t have to like it.”

“Fair enough.”

Bucky sighs, pulling away from Steve. The outside world comes rushing back in. He wonders if he can bring some of the art pieces with him and ask Sam to hang them on his kitchen wall. He probably won’t take much convincing.

“Is Hill okay?” he asks at length. “You know, with what happened to Nick and all?”

Inexplicably, Steve looks sheepish, and more than a little annoyed. He scratches the back of his neck. “Well,” he says. “About that.”

 

  


vii. 

At 0500 hours, Sam Wilson pulls up outside the apartment block to pick up Captain America, the Winter Soldier, and their golden retriever. 

At 0505 hours, they stop blushing and stuttering at one another long enough to get in the car and drive away. Bucky, who is extraordinarily sleep-deprived, makes Sam put on Taylor Swift and sings along the whole way, with hair-raising effects on the other passengers.

At 0521 hours, they reach Sam’s house. Bucky cheek-pecks Steve goodbye and fist-bumps Sam and scoots out of the backseat with James in tow. Then the car speeds off in the direction of the Triskelion, and he turns to look at James, who is watching him apprehensively.

“Well,” says Bucky with a sigh, already feeling the Steve-shaped hole in his heart, “I guess it’s just us.”

  
  


By 0746 hours, Bucky and James have hacked into the Triskelion CCTV feed and are surrounded on all sides by laptops and tablets, watching events unfold from Sam’s living room.

“He has a different suit from yours,” James observes. He’s glued to the screens, watching so avidly Bucky wonders if he thinks he’ll have to file a mission report later.

“Any moment now he’s gonna give a rousing speech,” says Bucky, with his feet up on a cushion and a bag of chips in his lap. Maybe if he pretends not to worry, James won’t either. “Turn up the volume, Jimsy. Ahh, there he goes.”

All they hear is static. “The suit looks nice,” says James.

“Listen to that. The freedom. The patriotism. My ears ring with it.”

“He looks nice,” says James of the one-track mind. “In the suit.”

  
  


At 0812 hours, something explodes onscreen. The feed goes dead, and not even James can resurrect it.

They turn on CNN. The news anchors are uninformative. They turn it off again.

  
  


At 1005 hours, James wanders off on a self-appointed mission to explore every last nook and cranny of Sam’s house. Bucky plays games on his phone, stares at Steve’s face on his lock screen, and emits maudlin noises.

James materialises at his elbow in that silent way of his, holding up a pad of Post-Its. “You gave me one of these once,” he says.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. On the quinjet. I wrote my number on it.”

“I’m not sure what happened to it,” says James. He looks bereft. “I think they took it away.”

“Well, clearly you managed to contact me anyway.”

James pulls on a loose thread from his sleeve. He says, “Can I have another?”

“Yeah,” says Bucky. “Sure.” 

He doodles a slightly misshapen shield on the Post-It, and adds smiley faces and the SSR wings from his old uniform all around it. Then he sticks it on James’s arm, beneath the red star. Very solemnly, James says, “Thank you.” 

With equal gravity, Bucky answers, “You’re welcome.”

  
  


At 1253 hours, they put on _Fellowship of the Ring_ and settle down with a cup of ramen noodles each.

Just as the Balrog appears, Sam’s living room window explodes into splinters of glass and six STRIKE gunners in full-body armour interpose themselves between the couch and the TV set. “Are you fucking kidding me,” says Bucky, as he dives for the pistol he’s stowed under the couch cushions. By the time he gets his first bullet off, acutely aware of how vulnerable he is with his broken arm, James has taken out three of the invaders and sent two more crashing into each other. Bucky dispatches the last.

Scowling magnificently, with a dead guy’s throat still clutched in his whirring metal fist, James says, “Rewind, please.”

  
  


At 1417 hours, Bucky pauses the movie so he can show James a shaky video that showed up on his Twitter feed: Sam with his Falcon wings, careening and dive-bombing across the sky while missiles whistle in his wake. A large blond figure in a deep blue suit dangles from his ankle.

Bucky’s chest aches. He has a great many things to say, none of which can be expressed with words. What he does say is, “I hate these assholes.”

James studies his face carefully. After several seconds of consideration, he scoots 2.75 inches across the couch towards Bucky, and says, “I don’t think they’ll die.”

  
  


By 1646 hours, Bucky has slid down to the floor, his good arm propped up on the couch, with James sitting cross-legged like a schoolboy next to him. His hair, which smells of Steve’s shampoo, tickles the crook of Bucky’s elbow. It’s a nice feeling.

“I wish I had accelerated healing,” says Bucky. “If I weren’t injured I would be there with him.”

“Sorry,” says James.

After a very long pause he adds, “I could lend you my arm. It’s a left one.”

Bucky nearly spills his Coke. “Oh, God, no.” Then he realises that James’s lips are twitching, and bursts into somewhat wild laughter.

  
  


At 1836 hours, a car pulls up the driveway.

James is out on the porch in approximately 600 milliseconds. Bucky, still trying to pretend he isn’t worried, takes his time getting up and following after. Sam is hobbling out of the car, looking beat up and slightly sooty. “Bad day at the office?” Bucky calls. 

Sam winces. “You have no idea.” 

He looks back, and there Steve is, whole and unhurt and gorgeous, getting out from the passenger side with his shield—Bucky’s shield—slung over his back. All efforts at pretense fall away. Bucky hurtles into him and nearly bowls him over, and Steve laughs and pulls him in close. He kisses Bucky on the nose—a playful, gentle kiss, a harbinger of more to come. He smells of sweat and dust, but his hands are clean today. “Everything okay?”

Bucky plasters his face against Steve’s neck. God, he hates being left behind. “We couldn’t get any sensible information from the news channels. Just blurry phone videos and Twitter rumours and the like.”

“It went fine,” says Steve. “It’s all fine. The helicarriers are at the bottom of the Potomac. Half of HYDRA’s dead or arrested and the other half’s in hiding.” He pauses, his lips warm against Bucky’s temple. “They had a Red Room agent on the last helicarrier. Nat took her down. She’s in medical now, she’s fine, just pissed off as all hell. Everyone else is all right.”

Bucky exhales. “Okay.” 

He steps away from Steve and nearly collides with James, lurking just behind him with a shoddy approximation of a neutral expression on his face. Bucky asks, “What’s up, Jimsy?” at the same time as Steve grins, and says, “Come here.”

James takes a step forward, like he’s marching on parade. He puts his chin on Steve’s shoulder. He arranges his flesh hand on Steve’s back. He holds his metal one stiffly at his side, until Steve says, “That one goes on my hip,” and he does as instructed. Then Steve gives him one of his sweet, all-encompassing, makes-the-rest-of-the-world-look-insignificant bear hugs; which—knowing HYDRA—is possibly a landmark phenomenon without antecedent in all of James’s long life.

Bucky turns away to hide the fact that his eyes are prickling. “You guys are disgusting,” he says. “I’m gonna go hug Sam.”

“God preserve me,” says Sam, but he only tries half-heartedly to escape.

  
  


viii.

“Steve,” says Bucky.

Steve produces a noise close to _Mmmmfth,_ rolls over, and plants his face into Bucky’s neck.

“ _Steve_ ,” says Bucky again, more urgently.

Nothing happens. When civil measures fail, one must resort to drastic alternatives. He applies the cold soles of his feet to Steve’s calves. The effect is instantaneous. Steve squawks and ricochets to an upright position, hair tumbling over his face. “Bucky,” he hisses. “It’s the middle of the night.”

The curtained window is dark. Outside the close confines of Sam’s spare room, nothing stirs. A week has passed since the fall of SHIELD. They are supposed to be apartment-hunting, but there have been no developments on that front, just as no one has come to arrest James and put him on trial. (Possibly because most of the people who know of his existence have recently had a helicarrier dropped on their heads; “a fairly effective deterrent,” as Nick put it.) “Sam’s couch,” says Bucky, “is sixty inches from our door.”

Steve rubs his eyes. “You mean, the couch with James on it?”

“That’s the one.”

He knows Steve will see where this is going. Steve, after all, has a mathematical mind, full of angles and distances and trajectories. (He has also returned to school and been informed by one of his more terrifying professors that dismantling the government is not a valid excuse for missing class. His fingertips have been electric blue four days in a row.) “Wasn’t it sixty-eight inches yesterday night? And seventy-odd the night before that? I don’t know how you’re taking all these measurements without waking him, but—”

“—the conclusion is—“

“—Sam’s couch is moving across his living room.” 

“Towards our door.” 

“With James on it.”

Steve looks like he’s about to burst out laughing. It is Bucky’s favourite of all his expressions, except perhaps the Jaw of Righteous Anger. “We could plot a graph,” says Bucky seriously. “To demonstrate the linear function between days passed and distance from couch to door—” 

“—or we could just invite him in.”

Bucky is out of bed again and making for the door in two seconds flat. “Okay.”

The living room is dark, except for the night light that Sam gave to James to keep by his bedside. In its faint glow Bucky can see a tousled head and a pair of luminous eyes, wide awake and plainly attached to a person who has spent the last few minutes eavesdropping furiously.

“Hey, pal,” says Bucky. “Sam’s spare bed is obnoxiously big and I can’t get warm. No pressure, I’m just sayin’.”

He retreats to the room, leaving the door ajar. It isn’t the first time he’s asked and been turned down, though that was before the couch achieved sentience and began to move. He wouldn’t be surprised if James wanted to keep sleeping outside, in his own space. But then, just as he’s getting back into bed, the door creaks open, and James stands on the threshold cocooned in all three of his blankets. The night light is clutched in his hand like a lantern, and a rifle hangs over one shoulder, its shadow scythe-like behind him. He looks a bit like a modernised depiction of Death, if Death has somehow developed an uncanny resemblance to a burrito in the last few centuries.

“That’s right,” says Bucky encouragingly. “The lamp goes on the bedside table. You go on the bed. The rifle goes on the floor. Sorry, it’s Steve’s rule. No guns in bed.”

With what appears to be a carefully constructed air of reluctance, James does as instructed. He flops over on his stomach, arranges his head on a pillow, and blinks at them owlishly. His arm, Bucky notices, is wrapped in a spare blanket so its metal plating doesn’t brush up against anyone’s bare skin. After five precisely timed minutes, he asks, “Are you still cold?” 

“No,” says Bucky. Steve is grinning like a dolphin on his other side, and for God’s sake, it’s like lying between two furnaces. “On the contrary, I’m actually sweating.”

“Okay,” says James. He looks delighted, and distinctly self-congratulatory. “Good night.” 

Bucky wriggles around, and—after a few moments—manages to get comfortable, with James’s hair tickling his nose and Steve’s chin poking into his shoulder*. “Good night.”

(* As far as he’s concerned, both of these are excellent problems to have.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from the song "Antebellum" by Vienna Teng.
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) and also I wrote [an original novel](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post) about gay arch-nemeses if you're into that kind of thing.
> 
> If you liked this, maybe check out [the steve rogers home for wayward barneses](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5638756), the excellent multi-Bucky tie-in drabbles by [sonatine](http://sonatine.tumblr.com)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] the light of our armistice day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5788576) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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